As It Happened: A Novel

By David Storey

A wry and deeply affecting novel about a man’s ruminations on art and death by the Man Booker Prize–winning author of This Sporting Life

Matthew Maddox is an art historian and professor emeritus at the Drayburgh School of Fine Art. Nearing 70, his 3 sons are grown and his ex-wife, Charlotte, has remarried. After a failed suicide attempt in front of a moving train, Maddox attends art therapy classes in order to find new meaning in his life.
 
Although he is isolated, Maddox does have his champions. Simone, his lover and partner, is returning shortly from an analysts’ conference in Vienna. She has her own baggage, but Simone feels responsible for Maddox. Others who genuinely care about Maddox include his former mentor Daniel Viklund, whose wartime past fascinates Maddox; his older sister, Sarah; and his younger brother, Paul. There is also Eric Taylor, once his most promising student, now a convicted murderer, in whom Maddox sees echoes of his own life.
 
An unabashed novel of mental illness, As It Happened tells of the prisons in which we find ourselves, the anxieties that exert their hold, and the desperate search for purpose in how we live and how we die.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Sep 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504015172

David Storey

David Storey was born in 1933 in Yorkshire, England, and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. His novels won many prizes, including the Macmillan Fiction Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Man Booker Prize. He also wrote fifteen plays and was a fellow of University College London. Storey passed away in 2017 at the age of eighty-three.

Book preview

1

Grim day, Maddox was thinking. If I’ve gone over the edge that’s quite all right by me, this place as good as any.

In a space scarcely sufficient to accommodate twelve with their donkeys and easels there were, by his calculation, twenty-one. Although, unlike the previous week, the model had turned up, the instructor’s insistence on teaching, rather than an aid to concentration, was proving a distraction: no doubt, being paid, he’d felt obliged to do something, periodically shifting the model so that no pose was held for longer than fifteen minutes, the day, as a consequence, devoted to little more than sketching, a procedure intended, evidently, to prevent the class from getting bored.

Following the line of the breast, he indicated the nipple, adjusted its alignment and pursued the shape of the hip to the thigh; etching in the Venusian slit, his mind drifted on to thoughts of Simone.

How often and how deeply he had buried there – at his age, approaching seventy, less achievement than intention – moving his pencil to the knee, the calf, the model an effulgence, seemingly, of the room itself: the hall of a former primary school, the structure given over to adult classes in calligraphy as well as carpentry, motor-engineering as well as art, evidence, mainly, of the burgeoning of Third Age talents, much of which was displayed, periodically, in the entrance hall below.

Stooped, head bowed, glasses perched close to the tip of his nose, sighting the object over the top of the frame, he pursued his thoughts in counterpoint to the movement of his pencil. To his left, Rachel (Mrs Herzog), widow of a jeweller, posed, legs astride, before her paint-smeared easel, the model’s shape achieved by an indecorous use of crayon. A film of coloured dust drifted down her pinned-up sheet of paper and settled on her blue, white-stitched overall: an elderly, short, attractive creature, her breast agitated engagingly by the vigorous movement of her arm.

To kalon.

The Greek came to him.

To prepon.

Thought and feeling so rarely combined – eradicating blankness, supervising space, more dream, he felt, than image …

In a glass partition, blanked out by paper on the other side, at the end of the hall, dividing it from the landing beyond, he glimpsed his figure astride its donkey, short, stocky, white-haired (cut short), the baldness at the crown invisible from this distance, recalling the suggestion made by Simone – eight years his junior, mercurial, slight of build – that he was about to undergo a ‘change’ (a ‘chance’, as she described it).

Mrs Loewenstein (Ailsa) becalmed in widowhood, too, a fragile (sensitised) creature, also standing at an easel: the steady drift downwards of charcoal dust. What had these women and he in common? age, death; a final refinement, introspection – engagement, in his case, with what, after a lifetime, he might, if not instinctively, consistently have avoided (primal: carnal: tethered in a cage): instead of inspection, assessment – retribution – a scoring-out from the blackness of forms – shapes (not unlike the one before him) a perspective on his life narrowed to a focus – this specific focus of appreciation. After a lifetime of exposition he was trying ‘it’ himself.

Mrs Sutor (Mary), a robust, pugnacious figure astride a donkey, its structure creaking beneath her weight, reducing to miniscule yet frantic proportions the figure before her, a bullet-shaped brow focused on the space ahead: wealth, age … Simone: his mind distracted, feeling, at that moment (he’d meant to tell her), he had learnt – was learning – a great deal from his sons: something unforeseeable, the distance their minds had come, a perspective from their childhood, he looking through papers the previous night, after she had rung, coming across a photograph of Joseph (Joe!) sitting on his knee, aged three or four, in his arms, Steven, not much more than one, and had to acknowledge that that impertinent, self-conscious look had matured into the circumspection which now characterised the man.

Similarly Charlie (what plain names Charlotte and he had given them) last night on the phone, conjuring commitment out of the air on the strength only of a dream: his view of his chosen profession as ‘clerc’, as Maddox described it – television presenter and high-liver – questioning him on what he felt and what he thought, particularly re Taylor, now Taylor had made a request to see him, as if it were specifically of interest to him what his father thought and felt, Maddox recalling his son’s final question, ‘Were you called Mad Ox at school?’

Simone would be back from Vienna by the time he’d told her this: the rumour – from Taylor’s lawyer – that Taylor had tried to hang himself (again) in Brixton, had been transferred and was once again the subject of a twenty-four-hour suicide watch.

Poor sod.

Love for ever.

Yours sincerely,

Matthew Maddox.

Hannah (Mrs Steiner) astride a donkey like a horse (her husband, reportedly, in terminal decline) moving vigorously in his direction: the piercing, animalistic, snarling expression with which she perused the model from across the room (drawing him, he assumed, in the background).

Mrs Herzog standing beside him, a tower of strength (the similarity of their ages). All he was conscious of was her crayon torturing the pinned-up sheet before her. How she stormed, alarmed, excited: the spontaneity, the transposition, the generosity of feeling bereft of thought (calculation: doubt) eschewing what, on other occasions, in different circumstances, bereft of such agitation, he might easily have alluded to as common sense.

The longer the course went on – all day Thursday, every week – the more he was aware that it wasn’t the model he was observing so much as the women, selecting his position, for instance, with Rachel in mind, a lascivious intent; in reality, an appreciation of an alertness of an uncommon kind – as implicit in her looks as much as the way she held her crayon, consumed by a forcefulness he not only admired but found inspiring, a forcefulness characterised, paradoxically, by probity, sensibility, commitment, he long of the opinion it would have been more fruitful for her to draw in pencil, refinement in her style, her eyes, her manner … watching her hand, left-handed, the crayon darkening her fingers, aware of the objects – the items, the flesh – she must have held there in the past: the activities of such a hand, the pregnant space between thumb and forefinger, the nakedness which her hand, her cheek, her ear – half hidden beneath her hair (tinted auburn, the grey showing through in flashes) suggested (insinuated, confirmed, evoked).

When they talked – he, Rachel, Mary and Hannah – over coffee in the canteen – the mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks, lunch in the pub next door – the same discoloured hand, like Ailsa’s, was laid before him (unusable, untouchable: a longing to plunge it beneath the kitchen tap, exposing the delicacy and pinkness of the nail), the configuration beneath her smock of a still dynamic figure, carelessly presented …

He had been so taken up with Ailsa (Mrs Loewenstein), Rachel (Mrs Herzog) and Mary (Mrs Sutor) that he had long neglected Ruth, the most youthful of the women in the room – thirty-five or thirty-six – youthful, apart from the dysfunctional and irregularly attending Sheba: the week, for instance, when the latter’s social worker had stormed into the room and called her fiercely, dramatically, sensationally outside: shouts (screams) associated with ‘cash’, ‘missed opportunities’, and the plight of her unfortunate baby dumped in the crêche below.

He had – as had most of the women – heard of Ruth’s three children, ensconced in private schools, her husband a ‘trader’ in the City, her car invariably parked across two spaces in the former playground below: her photographs of Martinique, her yacht, her chums (her husband: lithe, close-cropped: expansive, unwavering eyes) passed around the table at coffee time: all the vitality appropriate to her age, a tall, lean figure, despite her three children, a wholesome, innocent, unknowing face, an engaging, infectious gaiety, vividity evident in her ingenuous glances at the model: spontaneous, alert, unperceiving, confirming what she knew already, had seen, registered and digested from inspection of her own remarkable body: the alacrity she brought to what she described as her ‘measly efforts’, an unexpected sobriety intervening, a moment of hesitation, doubt, which appealed to him immensely, her long, tapered fingers braced to her pencil, the arc of her neck as, standing, half leaning at her easel, she peered round her board at the model: the delicate moulding of her ear in contrast to the stringency, the alertness, the synchronicity of her features, her hips braced inside her jeans, a figure full of potency, fun, irreplaceable, unapproachable, a sombreness rather than a calmness evident in her nature which relied – belying her vivacity – on something durable, solid, unassailable, as if the world, her world, were arrested from time to time and more than carelessly examined.

All of them middle class, except for Mrs Angenou (Maria), ninety-one years of age, seated astride her donkey oblivious, or so it seemed, of the shortness of her skirt: fists like hams, a jowled face, eyes sheathed in horizontal folds of flesh: back stooped, shoulders heavy, a Cypriot background, reducing everything in her sketch-book to matchstick proportions, Neil, their instructor, tall and lanky, standing bemusedly beside her, wondering on the relevance, at this belated stage

of saying anything at all

stooping, close-focused, denim-jeaned (red sweatshirt: gold chain around his neck, suspended, a tiny filament, from his narrow throat), suggesting the alignment of her figures might be adjusted: the one memorable occasion when ‘Harold’, their gay Lothario, had fallen asleep in his recumbent (model’s) pose and they had watched, with stifled amazement, humour, finally embarrassment, an erection of the most colossal proportions taking place before (specifically Maria Angenou’s and) their astonished eyes.

Arthur the only other man in the room, apart from Duncan, the actor who had told them on more than one occasion he was asexual (‘a sexual what?’ Ruth had enquired), looking, he, Arthur, for a companionship which couldn’t be shared in any way other than the one he and Maddox shared with the women – ‘artists’, as Neil inappropriately (democratically) described them, he, Maddox, finding the intensity of Arthur’s application, as well as the evidence littered around his feet, intimidating to a degree. ‘Do you think you could draw less and concentrate more?’ he had asked him, Arthur’s grizzled, bearded head, with its long, white hair and balding brow, his massive, excessively muscled figure dominating the room (‘not an ounce of fat on him’: Duncan) as might Moses’ on his descent from the mountain, the tablets, like Arthur’s, tucked conspicuously beneath his arm: his boots, his robust legs, his shorts, his ‘tropical’ top, reeking of sun and sweat: was it essential to get down to art as if it were an expedition, swathes of charcoal-ingrained paper strewn around his feet, his easel, those adjoining …?

He had attributed ‘Genius’ to Arthur’s performance – a nickname picked up and adopted by the women – but how oppressive, putting his and their own work in the shade: seventy-five, he’d told Maddox, and never been ill, apart from when he had been shot at Arnhem, the evidence vividly revealed whenever, frustrated by his output, he opened the front of his shirt, mortality, at his age, a frightening thought: the blistering of the flesh in the crematorium flame – likened to his description of a German tank with its cindered crew intact inside.

So how did his insistence on ‘reality’ help someone who had come, as they say, to the end of the line? Arthur’s size, domination of the room: how could something so enhancing be embracing ‘art’, as he was inclined to call it, as ‘a final answer’, a ‘last, redeeming feature’, particularly when he, Maddox, had embraced it as a theoretician all his previous working life, not least before he knew anything about it, those intoxicating teenage years alive with Fra Filippo Lippi, Signorelli, Uccello, Cimabue? Genius’s wife, Genius had reported, having died the previous year (‘if only she could see me now’), he not inclined to look for another, potency, he had suggested at his age, out of the question, ‘mind’ all that mattered – imagination, he’d described it, stretched beyond its resources (fear, its inevitable corollary, Maddox reflected).

Mrs Samuels (Susannah) a plain, high-breasted woman with the arms and the shoulders of a pugilist, jeans too tight, arthritic feet, positioning her easel beside the wall on which she leant from time to time, a tree-trunk of a woman with a decorous intent: leaf-like extrusions on her paper, a scarcely discernible figure shaded in as if in defiance of her stoical if occasionally groaning nature, Maddox reflecting on himself, the morning light already fading, weariness evident before the coffee break, stretching his legs on either side of his donkey …

Glancing down at his effort, Rachel returned her gaze to her own as if, in him, she had found a marker, a comparison which enlightened as well as, going by her expression, dismayed. So much, Maddox thought, for being here, amidst an activity which, only a short while before, he would have had no time for: the women, too, children and husbands (mostly) gone, succeeded by a generation where these things counted less, if anything at all – Mrs Angenou excepted, time an element to ignore …

his gaze moving to the ceiling, spattered here and there with paint …

eschewing the past, resistant to it absorbing the present, reducing it to what could only be described, distorting it by what could only be imagined

senses tuned to what might have been recalled

as to what might have been discarded …

scrutinising something which he would never touch, the obscurity of its source, its subtlety, its light

its nakedness, its charm, its

vulnerability and, in posing there at all, its thoughtfulness – above all, its vulnerability, ashes to ashes in another form.

His gaze turned not to his drawing – the detritus left on the paper by his moving arm, the carbon held between his thumb and finger – but to the skin on the back of his hand, blotched, the veins conspicuous.

Genius, as always, was hauling them along, his booted feet, the toe-caps glistening, laces tight, the bulbous, wool-stockinged calves overlooked by the robust, sunburnt knees, the lower extremities of his sunburnt thighs …

Maddox’s mind slipping into abbreviation (parentheses included), the light angular from the former schoolroom windows: Jeanette, the diminutive Scotswoman, a pale sliver of a face – a past written there as libertine or slave – a schoolmarm with a lifetime’s dedication forfeited to rooms no doubt as resonant as this, an angular figure astride a stool, heel sportively tucked into a strut beneath, half sitting, half standing, a remarkable conjunction between eye and hand, as if not drawing but writing, a fiction inscribed, in its casualness, for all to see, a riposte to something omnivorous in the other women: cvc’s, so named, by Genius: ‘cultural vacuum cleaners’ sucking up all sorts of rubbish, ‘mine, not theirs, I mean’.

That endowment of flesh, good humour, grace, the unconsidered, post-menopausal flourish

leaving carbon in lieu of child

here to think, not draw

Maddox surprising himself, once absorbed, by humming hymn tunes, a rhythmic exhalation, stanzas learnt fifty or so years before.

Why now? Why here? he living along the street (or two) from the institution, Genius and Duncan the only other men in the queue on enrolment day, following the latter’s account of his acting career in The Dreaded Beacon at the corner a few hours later (all morning queueing to sign on), from a ‘vagabond on the road at twelve’ when he allegedly ran away from home, joining a circus ‘with no questions asked’, his benefactor-cum-patron-cum-inductive-lover paying for him through acting school at the age of nineteen, ‘seventeen years in rep’ before parts in television, in film and finally, ‘on the West End stage’, progressing to a life he described as ‘a suitable occasion for indiscretion’ …

more seen by inadvertence than direct glance

what they, at the centre, could only infer

portentousness his style

a misjudged, misplaced, misperceived phenomenon, dispensed with in the life-room more easily, he suggested, than anywhere else, Maddox watching him from across the room as the actor struggled with his drawing (‘more difficult than learning a part: at least, with that, there’s an end to it’), a lean, ascetic face, and figure, wearing a beret, diagonally, across his brow: aquiline nose, thin-lipped mouth, protuberant cheekbones, pale blue eyes: a weathered flange of flesh above his smock’s blue canvas collar: ‘How I resist doing anything!’

‘In which case,’ said Genius, ‘why do it here?’ his own expanse of flesh, Arnhem-flawed, dominating not only them but the room, Duncan, a discontented expression, demoralised by what he mistakenly recognised as the facility inherent in every other drawing but his own, including Maria Angenou’s stick-like scratches (‘mice could do better!’ Genius exclaimed), the reality being he had come here for distraction: ‘Every word has meaning,’ Duncan had complained, ‘while all I make are indecipherable sounds, though not,’ he pleaded, ‘from want of trying,’

sitting, standing, crouching, Maddox observing the observers not the model, she, the latter, Alexis, a twenty-six-year-old refugee, her child and husband, at home-time, coming to the life-room door, occasionally stepping in to observe the wife and mother: the dark-eyed, masculine, gracious face smouldering with recollection and, presumably, disaffection (did he want his wife to be posing in the nude, even if to a room largely comprised of women?), the infant’s incredulous, unmoving, tiny face cradled in his arm, its dark eyes fixed on its unsmiling mother: privacy enclosed in their departing figures as, the mother dressed, they descended to the street.

In Kosova she might not have reckoned with this, stripped of dignity in one place to be stripped of it again in another – Maddox, in his solitariness, calling less to a maker, less to her, less to her silent, solemn, sultry husband – dark-faced, dark-eyed, expressionless – than to a reciprocal stillness within himself, a stillness, in this instance, emanating from the room, a place of exclusion which, in his mind, paradoxically, included everything.

The mores of a life-room which no one, not rightfully there, could enter without Neil calling, ‘Would you wait outside,’ less question than injunction.

‘Rest,’ he said, the observers sighing, Alexis stretching, Genius, groaning, watching the novel movements of that head and body, motionless for the past quarter of an hour, his features arrested in revisionist thought, charcoaled sheets around his booted feet, bellowing from his outstretched throat, his arms flung up above his head: the room as view of something other than a studio – Maddox standing, too, reflectiveness abandoned, the majority of the women drifting out, Genius remaining, examining the floor, finally glancing up at Maddox, he, having stretched, re-seating himself sideways on his donkey.

‘Coffee?’ a sheet in one hand, Genius, his hair pulled back by the other.

‘It keeps me awake at night.’

‘Long time between then and now.’

‘Nevertheless,’ Maddox said, ‘enough.’

‘Too many changes.’ Genius gestured round. ‘Keeps shifting the model. Doesn’t want any of us to draw. Talks all the time of essence,’ adding, ‘No sooner get going with one than you have to start another,’ glancing down at Maddox’s final effort. ‘Isn’t he a t’ai chi enthusiast?’ his head turning upwards, blue eyes examining the ceiling, a look, Maddox surmised, which had gazed over oceans, deserts: ‘The specious end-game we’re all playing,’ the weathered skin (reptilian past). ‘Odd, at our age,’ returning to his drawings. ‘Get anything out of coming here?’

‘A lot.’ Surmise, or lying, he couldn’t tell.

‘Really?’ The reptilian eyes looked up. ‘Seems a terrible waste of time to me.’

‘Why?’

‘Museums full of the stuff. Too much to exhibit, yet here we are, producing more. Might call it affectation,’ gesturing round.

‘Where the t’ai chi comes in,’ he said. ‘Not what, but how.’

‘Say?’ One studded boot placed firmly on his drawings, pushing them away as if a mat. ‘Public school prole, I call him,’ gesturing to the landing, the stairs, the canteen, adding, ‘Our instructor. Affectation to do as much with life as art. What I’m looking for, on the other hand,’ head lowered, ‘is engagement. If I die this minute I would die involved,’ scrubbing his boot over the drawings again. ‘Not drawing on, drawing in. Get it?’ his hand, his heavy, muscular hand, the forearm visible beneath his tropical sleeve, pushing at the air as if at a solid object. ‘Out of the particular into … not the divine. Nor hell. Something amoral. Aseitic,’ he concluded, ‘as the philosopher might have it.’

‘Which means?’ Maddox said. (‘Ascetic’, he was reckoning.)

‘Independent. Self-supporting. Not to be glimpsed in this place. The ladies, on the other hand,’ he paused, ‘are nice. Aseitic, if you like. We labour,’ he suddenly expanded, ‘they exist,’ moments later, without adding anything further, moving to the door, his boots, seconds after that, pounding on the stairs.

Sobriety, verging on unease, the object of Maddox’s morning, so much having preceded him until this moment – a moment (glancing at Rachel’s drawing above his head) when it felt as if he were about to reinvent himself.

2

Returning from the Centre exhausted: adulthood in doubt: wife re-married, children gone: after the day’s distraction, nemesis avoided, drying the pots in the sink in the kitchen at the back of the house, glad, at least, of a further distraction, waiting for Simone to ring: due home from Vienna (one conference too many), her voice with its light (infectious) interrogative tone: one of nature’s enquirers: why and how and when – the where excluded – a further perspective suddenly revealed, the ghost of his successor, prospectively, always on his mind: somewhere, anywhere, everywhere: to be announced when least expected, the model (that day) a catalyst, he thought, in that respect, less object than subject for reflection, recently matured, her body, no signs of pregnancy visible upon it; evidence, rather, of bounty, richness – ‘essence’, which Genius and the t’ai chi Neil so much went on about; that strange divergence from their own physique, mysterious, elusive, a resonance which transfigured, rounded, contained – plausible: different from that attachment between his legs, speaking of loss, dismemberment, being wrenched apart, anxious for reconnection, no wholeness associated with it. Old enough to be her father, his thankfulness for what she serenely expressed: a seraphic expression, guilelessness not that of an equivalent man, or her husband.

Conscious of pieces of paper lying around the house, on table, chairs, cupboards, shelves, the floor, on which inscribed

unconsciousness disharmony: sing for a living

ask Simone the meaning of intent

are anxiety attacks due to missing letters in the DNA; if so, where learnt experience?

are the accretions (epigenetics) recently discovered on genes the beginning of a causal theory of behaviour?

is space matter; if so, to whom?

still in the foothills: make everything plain

transitoriness a permanence of its own

which was why he looked at her more than at his drawing, to the delight of Neil, the jeaned instructor (slow motion: quick awareness) who conceived the perfect drawing: eight hours of concentration with nothing at the end to show for it, beholder and beholden one

brutum fulmen

her Balkan mind crossing a frontier few had known was there, extant in ways no amount of drawing, even less, photography or filming, could record, a rapture commemorated by her body, its disregard for what they, on sheets of paper, were actively pursuing

carbonating her

standing at the kitchen table (a narrow projection, the kitchen, from the back of the house), adding ‘a resonance which is shared by the stillness of your husband and your child, waiting for this mundanity to come to an end,’ his house, he had to face it, almost a wreck, subsidence evident in its outer as well as inner walls, an alarming or, in any other circumstances, would-be-alarming tilt to the windows, the building held together by those on either side. ‘Good job it’s in the middle of the terrace and not,’ he had told Simone, ‘at the end, otherwise,’ he’d gone on, ‘it would have fallen off,’ the ‘falling off’ a condition he recognised as his own – away, from, down – propped up by circumstance, chance – the ‘charge’ (the ‘chance’) Simone had mentioned, the residue of a life which, but for her, he had abandoned (left intriguingly at the side of the road to be picked up by anyone who happened to be passing: she as it turned out)

beyond his reach, these speculations, other than as something embodied in Alexis’s untroubled gaze, the trance she went into before their eyes, a spiritual residuum.

A sidestreet, in his own case, off the Chalk Farm Road: terraces one hundred and fifty years old, once strawberry fields approached, from the east, by a footpath crossing the River Fleet at Kentish Town, subsequently encroached upon, the river covered, by Victorian dwellings, associations unknown to him until recently, which absorbed him more and more, not least the tube line which ran through the London Clay directly beneath his feet.

Above the narrow rear extension, the bathroom, the main body of the house comprised of a single through-room on the ground floor, opening directly on to the kitchen, and two bedrooms on the floor above, a double one at the front, a single one at the rear, the furniture sparse, a post-marital requirement minimally expressed: drawers, a wardrobe, in the upper rooms and, in the loft, entered through a trap-door on the landing, the bric-à-brac he had stored there in a number of cardboard boxes.

Somewhere, in one of the boxes, were the photographs of his children, three infants (mainly) whom in most instances he was no longer able to differentiate, one from the other: the maternally expressive mother, the paternally apprehensive father, a source of fascination, the former, to her (second) husband Gerry, a peripatetic entrepreneur moving from company to company as executive bagman: good old G! (Brady: publicist and mesmeric raconteur).

A photograph of his children in their maturity he had by the bed: three men of strangely variable build, Charlie, like his mother, tall and slim, the eldest; Steven, the youngest, slightly built, neither like Charlotte nor himself, and Joseph, a broad, expansive figure who represented something of Maddox in nature and build, a formalised aloofness characterising their expressions, misleadingly, in this one photograph, creatures of Maddox’s own inventory: he had taken the picture, the occasion the announcement of his and Charlotte’s separation, paternity, however, despite their parents’ negative example, common to them all, offspring, he’d been delighted to see, eschewing complexity and self-division, beholden to their mother for composure, fair-mindedness, familial restraint (bearers of grace).

Charlotte, with some misgivings, had left him: he was getting old; so was she, it adding to her attractions. His expectations of anything better had been judiciously withdrawn, hers focused on excitation (companionability, curiosity, warmth), he, as it turned out, travelling in the opposite direction, a reductive if not, on reflection, annihilating process, she a volitional creature, he, he’d concluded – they’d both concluded – not: Ariadne winding up her string, leaving him deeper in than ever

a sinner: his disgrace

grateful, nevertheless, to Gerry, the avuncular MD, for providing her – providing all of them – with a life which otherwise they couldn’t afford.

The white walls (of his residence) were now a uniform grey, embellished with darker patches: the marks of his grandchildren’s hands on the stairs, a reminder, the infrequency of the visits, he was reluctant to remove: less house than alcove, quartered into use – distracted, at that moment, by voices, the crashing of a door, the sliding up and down of a window, audible through the party-wall: Berenice, known familiarly as Berry to her numerous callers, a voice as penetrative as a rock-drill, its harshness interspersed at intervals with the interrogative, ‘Right?’, a punctuative exhalation as potent as a shell expelled from the barrel of a gun – his neighbours on the other side, the Connollys, he a minister at the local Presbyterian church, relatively silent (hymn-singing, occasionally – with which, through the party-wall, he often joined in – on Mrs Connolly’s Wednesday evenings), Sundays a popular day for addicts at Berenice’s front door, marshalled in and out by Isaiah, her definitively non-Christian Afro-Caribbean minder, the poker-work wood panel beside the front door, below a snarling Dobermann head, inscribed ‘I can get to the gate in five seconds. Can you?’ putting no one off, as far as he was aware: the nightly recital of benefit and credit card fraud, fencing, the itinerary of Berenice’s more sporadic (now she was ageing) intimate engagements often accompanying Maddox’s reflections as he fell asleep.

He was missing Simone, night closing in: slim, high-bosomed, past her prime (in reality, coming into it): the high forehead, the dark hair, the fangs of grey on either side drawn back from carefully – erotically, magnetically – mascaraed and pencilled-in brown eyes (great care in preparing and laying on her make-up): an inquisitive, searching nature – given over, in maturity, to declamation: no children, despite three marriages. Having gone to her as a ‘client’ – recommended, ironically, by Charlotte, on the recommendation, in turn, of Gerry, several of whose employees had allegedly benefited from her ‘work’ – he’d come away, after several months, as something else entirely, she announcing an involvement at ‘something other than a clinical level’, a curious innocence, amounting to naïvety, having, in his view, characterised their encounters, one which, he imagined, rendered her immune to the potential depravity, despair, cynicism not only of him but of all her clients: something he’d belatedly, perhaps confusingly, recognised as ‘faith’, though in what, and to what purpose, even now, he had no idea, associating this with the ‘grace’ he thought he’d recognised that day in the Kosovan model.

Re-tracking his career in the dark: the prodigal essayist, one year out of the Courtauld (there as postgraduate, via Wadham), a junior curator at twenty-six (at a highly competitive time), a senior one at thirty, the Raybourne Professor of Art History at the Drayburgh School of Fine Art, succeeding Viklund who’d moved over to a similar but more remunerative post at the Royal College, inertia (and hack-work, ironically) at this point, coming in: lassitude, or indifference, or a liking for the atmosphere of the Drayburgh (its activities confined exclusively to fine, as opposed to applied art), together with the character of Pemberton, the unprecedentedly long-term, avuncular Principal, the college off the Euston Road, in any case, more accessible to his north London address than, should he have followed Viklund on the older man’s retirement, as many had imagined he would, South Kensington and the Cromwell Road? Tendentiousness, speciousness: a vocabulary he was inclined to favour retrospectively in assessing his career, having focused his attention, at that time, on his sons, the ‘familial triptych’ he’d assembled with Charlotte: their beauty, their grace (again): their divinity, even, drawn on, once more, to what he thought he’d recognised that day in the Kosovan model.

Night, on the single bed in the back room, where he slept when not in the front room with Simone: away from the sound of Berenice’s activities through the party-wall, the window open to the tiny backyard below, alive with birdsong, the evening light still strong. Aircraft lumbered up from Heathrow. Hers would have landed, he assumed, he disinclined to go and meet her amidst her colleagues, convinced, for one thing, his successor was amongst them, his insecurities in this area so entrenched that, exhausted by a day of speculation (observation: self-expression) he couldn’t rest. She would ring him once home: even, on one occasion, had rung him on arrival, anxious to reassure him that ‘nothing had changed’, her interest, at such moments of return, directed normally to her faxes, her e-mail, her answering machine, her collected calls on her mobile (no similar machinery, he reflected, at his end of the line): the slim, upright, recalcitrant figure, addicted to clothes, high heels, the paraphernalia, it invariably seemed to him, of an earlier existence: a charmed and constantly changing nature, commandeering his weaknesses, his strengths – his hopes (his remaining aspirations). Why so enamoured? he plaintively enquired: the fervour of his – and her – ‘conversion’, as she described it, he, one moment, sitting in her consulting-room on the ground floor of her house, the next, scarcely three months later, ascending the stairs to her living-quarters overhead: a further ascent to her roof garden: the plants, the air, the insects, the flowers (winter turning into spring), the view over the surrounding roofs to the West End, the smear, like a trail of smoke, of the North Downs in the distance: in the opposite direction, above the intervening roofs, the sky above the St Albans hills. It had – the word came spontaneously to mind – felt like home: the intimacy of the wood-panelled sitting-room below and, not long after that, the greater intimacy of her wood-panelled bedroom, occupied almost exclusively by the double bed: the fragrance of the sheets, the covers, the pillows.

Amidst her machines – her telephone rarely stopped ringing – her cellular containment amongst the skylights, gardens and chimneys, he identified a solitariness to match his own, he disengaged from her as a client, an echo (a facsimile) of those figures who came up the eroded stone steps to her door, attracted less to a favoured-by-nature mentalist than explicitly to a healer, he, from such speculation, evoking an image of someone alarmingly beyond his reach.

What, conversely, in him, appealed to her: to the extent of diverting her, uniquely, from a lifetime’s practice? An emeritus professor, to boot, with, currently, a singularly discredited background. Previously, the discursiveness as well as the dynamic of his life had been focused on a process which turned animal, vegetable and mineral matter into something, at the least, elusive, at the best, transcendent. He had, to this degree, set his signature on the past, a challenge to be superseded, if not by his own interpretations, by those of others. Atrophied by the process, he had reached the point where, in arresting history, he had arrested himself: writing in the notebook beside his bed, his head bowed, his body arced to the light still coming from the window …

‘What is her attraction?’ Charlotte had enquired – on the phone, having heard of the outcome of their encounters (engineered by her, he had begun to suspect, a prank, conceivably, on both their parts, he tossed helplessly between them). On the whole it had been too early, too unexpected, too sudden, too unlikely, to warrant hers or Gerry’s (or their sons’) intrusion: he and Simone had behaved like children, a regression to hitherto undiscovered, certainly unconsidered parts of their previous lives, a regression of which they were instantly aware, fear, of an inexplicable nature, having, ironically, in him, in the first instance, brought them together. ‘Like all men,’ he might have said by way of explanation of his attraction to a woman whose attractiveness, to him, was both alarming and profound. ‘My only regret,’ he’d told all of them, ‘is it’s too late for us to have children.’

The darkening sky outside, the lights appearing in the windows: rarely did anyone draw a curtain, the intimacy of the yards proscribing it. On the floor, by the bed, was one of the drawings he’d been preoccupied with throughout the day, the fragmentary outcome of several hours of observation: whatever had been achieved had been absorbed, the model an embodiment of something he had unknowingly been preoccupied by throughout his life

death around the corner: an aversion to signalling left or right

the language of an earlier discipline had found a muse

long after he might have expected it …

The phone rang, the window still open, the room dark. He must have fallen asleep, lighted transparencies, the other windows along the backs.

Obliged to get out of bed, the phone in the other room where, on her rare visits, they slept, he picked it up.

‘How are you?’

He was well.

‘We didn’t say much on our previous call.’

‘Nevertheless, I’m relieved you’re back. I take it the weekend and your paper went well,’ imitating, he noticed, her interrogative tone.

‘I was thinking much of you.’

‘I of you,’ he said. ‘When you’re away, a tabula rasa on each occasion,’ a baby crying from across the street, Berenice mercifully silent through the party-wall.

A light went on behind a curtain: the crying stopped.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ arranging the time. She might have suggested his coming-up now, or her coming-down, her e-mail read, faxes examined, messages listened to, he concurring, however, tonight was too late, unease at her absence brought to an end.

‘Much love!’ the sound of her voice.

‘Much,’ he confirmed.

The sound of her laughter.

‘Much,’ he repeated (a bottomless well).

How far, reflecting, back in bed, having curtained his window, the top ajar, should speculation go? Two miles away – less than that, a mile-and-a-half – two tube station stops beyond Chalk Farm, the pilgrim route to St Albans, over the crest of Holly Bush Hill, she, he imagined, would be pottering around her flat, the lamplight on the panelling, the cretonned furniture she went in for, rugs with extravagant Iberian designs (‘murillos’, she called them), intimacy in her domestic life as in her work, something of a whore in this situation, too, a lending not of her body but of her mind, her acuity, her spirit, a reinforcing of a persona not her own.

Dreams, when they came, had involved, over recent nights, a house he had left forty-seven or more years before, reinhabiting its rooms – deserted, in some dreams, in others cluttered with the furniture which, unseen for all that time, was more familiar than his own: a fireguard he’d forgotten, bought when his younger brother was born; a cot, a Victorian creation, with embellishments, carved animals in relief at either end, its woodwork glowing in the light from the nursery fire: their biblical names, Matthew, Paul, Sarah, his elder sister, his imagination fired, finally, into wakefulness by Simone’s call: his brother’s jobs, his high-pitched, almost hysterical apprehension, as a child, peculiar in the context into which he was born, youthful, in appearance, even at sixty, ‘engaged and engaging’ in his description of Paul to Simone who, he had discovered belatedly, had a liking for sensitive, high-minded men (something of the same which, if extinguished, she’d located in him): had ‘gone into the Church’ in his early twenties, a process phrased at the time as if into a building (St Albans Cathedral and Abbey remains at the end of the road), ‘coming out’ at the age of thirty-one, God ‘a misplaced endeavour, sought but not found (knocked, but not opened)’ his (credible) reasons, rather than excuses, relief, Maddox recalled, to both of them, at this confession (‘I gave it a try’), apprehension, so conspicuously evident in his youth, disappearing, never to return, Paul passing, as if by means of a natural process, an evolutionary procedure (‘the ethic’s much the same’) into ‘banking’: discretion, sobriety, fidelity to a system, much play made at the time with the parable of the talents: ‘praise by employment’, a ‘secularised religion’, ‘work as prayer’, water into wine displaced by rock dust, clay and ore into concrete, brick and steel: the pointed, inquisitive, curiously trusting Maddox face tuned to application, tuned, too, specifically, to belief – in what, in Maddox’s own case, however, he no longer had any idea, vocation, initially, in his brother’s case, as also in his …

his thoughts, at that instant, turning to their sister Sarah, vocational solely in maternity (heavy on her now), a biblical source of their names in common – but something else, he, a man as well as a brother, incensed on her behalf, she forging ahead throughout her life, a forager on her own as well as their behalf: strength, fortitude, dispassion, he privy to her nature, all things seen by him, in his youth, as if by her. How could Bully have walked away from her? the nickname, given affectionately, initially, by her, licensed by his surname Bulford, christened Charles.

Three Charleses in the family, as Sarah had pointed out, if Charlotte’s equally affectionately ascribed ‘Charley’ counted.

Was this – she the most religious of the Maddox family – the triumvirate she was always seeking (Father, Son and Holy Ghost), Paul’s apostasy, at the time, decried (bitterly) by her, while ‘lost to the Church’ their father’s ambivalent cry had greeted both Paul’s ordination as well as his subsequent recantation – his ‘reconversion to mundanity’ as Sarah had described it: ‘Wasn’t there room for another saint in St Albans?’ ‘Paul’ possessing, Maddox had assumed, at least for his sister, a canonical ring.

Plus: why was she so much stouter – taller, broader – than Paul and himself? femininity, giving her grace as a child, now endowing her with bulk, mass, scale: the inscrutability with which she looked over her children’s lives displaced by a familiar Maddox moral fervour, sensitive not so much to the proverbial ‘catch’ in life as its explicit moral resolution, as if, pro Maddox, their ends were not relative or personal but universal: ‘materialising death’, as she had once described it, distinguishing artfully between body and soul: a prescient sister, predicating Bully’s departure long before he had even thought of it, a passion for renewal, a reinvigoration, post-children, post-grandchildren, living subsequently, contentedly, enliveningly, engagingly, on her own.

Placed by their father in the seats of his cars, lined in an intoxicatingly scented row behind his showroom windows, the light reflecting off their bonnets – mudguards, roofs – the ‘massage’, as he called the paintwork, the odour of metal, oil, leather, polish sensationally, entrancingly, erotically combined, the garage and showroom fronting the